THE BOOK FAIR

Review:

“My Mother’s Ring”, a Holocaust fictional novel, centers on the life of Henryk Frankowski, a Polish Jew, born in Warsaw, in August of 1922.  In 1939, the Nazi Germans invaded and conquered Western Poland.  The Frankowski’s lives changed forever.  Frankowski speaks to the love he held for his family, and of their lives before the onset of war, and to the losses the family suffered.  Frankowski narrates his harrowing story of survival, from his experiences of starvation in the Warsaw Ghetto, to the unimaginable cruelty in the concentration camps, to his rescue from the Mauthausen death camp by the American Army, and finally, to a new life, beginning in New York.

The book, Dana Fitzwater Cornell’s first, reads quickly and is terse in style.  Cornell stated that her great aunt’s family spent over three years in labor and concentration camps as a result, of harboring a Jewish girl on their farm in Poland.

The author presents in the fiction novel, graphic, questionable and unsubstantiated material never before mentioned in Holocaust literature or Holocaust study.